(I actually finished this book a few weeks ago, but have been too lazy to review it.) War of Honor isn’t David Weber’s latest by any means, but it is to me, who just started the series earlier this year. This, the tenth book in the ongoing thread, isn’t quite the perfect storm we got in Ashes of Victory, but is nevertheless chock full of everything short of Haven’s total subjugation, and a much stronger novel.

I think I’ve just given up and decided to attempt and catch up with David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. All the way up. That means I’m currently working on Ashes of Victory, and it’s impossible not to notice the books are getting longer as the series rolls on. And in this case, it’s not just longer in page-length, but in exposition, political maneuvering, and copious droning. Compared to [Echoes of Honor(http://www.

With the introduction of PostgreSQL 8.4, Bruce Momjian, a significant core developer, contributed a tool that can actually upgrade an entire database cluster in place. The time required is essentially only that necessary to copy the data files from the old installation to the new one. On a quick RAID system, this can be an order of magnitude faster than a dump/restore. The main drawback is similar to Slony: disk space must effectively be doubled for this upgrade method.

I was fighting with packaging some software at work, trying to produce a workable RPM package to replace the manually installed kludge currently polluting one of our servers, and discovered the --spec-only option to the bdist_rpm action. Now, this particular option only makes sense since a spec file must be generated for bdist_rpm to work anyway, but I never thought about it. What it provides is an awesome shortcut to doing packaging slightly more complicated than merely relying on what bdist_rpm produces.

And David Weber’s Honor Harrington universe marches on with Echoes of Honor, like an army of undead, unstoppable and thirsting for brains. This time, we get to follow several distinct story segments as Honor and her team struggle to take over Hades and ultimately escape. The action this time around is almost unrelenting, and probably more importantly, relevant to the current story and future engagements. Weber has a thing for political intrigue, and of course it’s no stranger here.